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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Tashinski.

And once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in the 1920 Winter Olympics, US skater Teresa Weld was the only woman in the figure skating who performed jumps.

But she was marked down every time she did because her skirt rose above her knees, which was considered too scandalous.

Did she have pants on?

You can't tell if her skirt rises above the knees.

It depends how long the pants are.

Yeah, possibly they could be like bloomers.

Yeah, they did wear pants down to the knees back then.

So it sounds very sexy, James.

Oh, yeah.

And clearly it was at the time.

Yeah, it depends when about she wears.

If she wore what she was wearing then,

now in the Winter Olympics, like just to show behind the curtain, we're actually recording this when the Winter Olympics is on.

And you're going to hear this in the spring.

Sounds like she was showing people behind the curtain

of her dress.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Andy's drunk, just so everyone knows.

But yeah, she would have worn a skirt that was kind of round the ankles at the time because that's the way that women were.

She wouldn't have worn her skirt round her ankles.

She wouldn't have worn a skirt.

That does lose you points, actually, yeah.

It was round her ankles, but also round her calves and her knees and her thighs and her bum.

Yes, and that is the normal way of describing the long skirt.

And yeah, this is the way that basically until the 20s and 30s, women figure skaters would wear long dresses.

That's amazing.

And it was only when a very famous skater called Sonia Haney came along.

She was only 11 when she started to compete.

And because she was a child, she could get away with wearing like children's clothes.

Right.

Sorry, I thought she'd get away with wearing much sexier stuff.

Well, she didn't have to wear full adult long dresses.

Right, right, right.

Long dresses.

And she could do these amazing jumps.

And then all of the adult skaters had to wear short skirts so that they could keep up with her amazing skills.

So what was the skating like?

If Teresa Weld was the only person doing jumps, what were the others doing in their show off?

Well, it's called figure skating.

So they were doing figures mostly.

Like carving out shapes in the ice.

Yeah, exactly.

Not so much carving out so that you could then pull it out and there's a shape there.

The last person always fell through, didn't they?

Once you'd connected the lines.

Yeah, exactly.

So what you would do is you would do the shapes of a figure of eight or at the very start of figure skating, someone would shout out what figure they wanted you to do.

So they'd shout out, you know, snowman, and then you'd have to do a shape of a snowman, and then they'd shout out something else and you'd have to do that.

That's really cool.

But really in the olden days, figure skating, especially for women, wasn't about the jumps.

It was about doing something graceful, doing lots of shapes and stuff like that.

And then when this woman came in, Teresa Weld, she was the first to do the jumps.

And then before long, everyone was doing jumps.

And now they're doing kick-ass jumps.

Yeah, and the jumps sort of took over in a way because in television terms, drawing these circles into the ice wasn't as televisual for the Olympics.

So it'd usually be 60% or so of the mark that you would get was for the figures that you were creating in the ice.

And they just sort of thought, that's a good idea.

It does crap.

It sounds incredible, the process, because

it was ended about 30 years ago, wasn't it?

They stopped having actual figures.

So I read a bit about that and the judging took such a long time.

So there were 41 different figures at the start of it which you would have to be able to master.

But

the judges would examine the skating three times, as in they examined the shapes on the ice.

They would get down on their stomachs like detectives to tell if

there was a slight variation in the line or detectives.

It wasn't.

It was only detectives get on their stomachs.

It was like

forensics.

What they used to do, they would skate the shape of a dead body, wouldn't they, on the ice?

That was figure 37, yeah, yeah.

No, it was apparently the judging could last up to eight hours.

I read an article from the Deutschbiegel, the German thing, and it was saying this is, it was from the 80s, just before it ended, and it was like, this is so boring.

There was a guy called George Anderson who wrote a skating book in the 1860s, and he wrote that after the shamrock, a one-foot figure requiring three turns and two changes of edge, the acme of female accomplishment has now been reached.

Wow.

So he's like, once you've done the shamrock, there's literally nothing better than that.

It's true.

Wow.

Downhill ever since.

All these quintuple spins.

Oh, yeah.

One of the early guys who sort of turned figure skating into the sort of art that it is now was a guy called Jackson Haynes.

He was from New York, born in the 1840s, and he started, he was the person who kind of turned it into more of a dance.

You know, he was trained in ballet and

he took popular dances like the waltz and he turned that into what you would do do on the ice.

And he did this in America and they hated it there.

So he came over to Europe and he started performing it here and they loved it here and he performed to royalty.

But I've been reading into banned things that would get you deducted points or that you're not allowed to do at all.

One of the things in modern times is you're not allowed same-sex couples when you do Olympic or even any sort of official skating.

And it turns out that the very first pairing, which is with Jackson Haynes, was a same-sex couple.

Was it?

Yeah.

Well, he was dancing with another guy.

Yeah, he was dancing with another guy.

It was in Vienna.

It was called Franz Belazi, and they were the first ever couple.

And he's held up, actually, as a result, as a sort of LGBT pioneer.

Are we sure they weren't doing a same-sex couple just because it was so regressive that women weren't allowed to do figuring?

Was it that they were a

progressive, progressive?

You know, at a certain point in the circle, they're the same.

That's possible, although he's sort of been embraced by the community as sort of being progressive.

Was it the tango that was also like that originally?

Tango's only men.

Yeah, there was one dance cray.

I can't remember whether it was Flamenco or Tango or, but there was eight huge dance craze, which was men only, that we think of as a mixed-ex dance these days.

It was classically meant to be that, yeah.

I should say as well that Haynes wasn't, he was dressed as a bear at the time.

So

it wasn't strictly

two men dancing together.

I think that is still Strictly's.

Well, he was, yeah.

I mean, if only Strictly was like that.

And do you watch the masked singer and you go, well, obviously it's an actual robot buddy.

I mean, I don't know what they're talking about, celebrities.

This is clearly a big pile of donuts.

I'm afraid you are disqualified.

It's a human-only.

Human-only sorry.

So women skating was a kind of a thing, or women competing anyway in figure skating.

And it was actually because of the clothes, these long dresses, that they weren't allowed to take part in the world championships.

So there was basically only men who entered figure skating contests for ages, and it just wasn't really, didn't occur to people that a woman might enter so they didn't ban it and then this amazing skater called Madge Sires entered in 1902 the World Figure Skating Championships and she got silver and there was lots of reports saying she should have got gold and actually the winner was a guy called Ulrich Salko and he offered her his gold medal because he said I think you were actually the deserving winner you were better than I was but anyway then the judges were like oh bummer like we weren't supposed to have women in this what are we gonna do and so they went through all the problems with having women figure skate.

And they basically said it was things like the problem with it is that a judge might judge a girl on how much he's attracted to her rather than how good she is at skating.

Definitely a problem with the female skater rather than with the judges there.

Get her off the ice.

But the other thing was that because their dresses are so long, you can't see their feet.

So they could be doing anything under there.

They could be cheating, they could have five feet,

they could have a child under yeah, yeah, like I have a snowmobile.

Yes, exactly.

Well, you think it's like sneaking into a cinema where it's sort of

three kids in a coat.

Yeah.

Three kids in a coat, and they can't let that kind of thing get through.

And so, to be fair to Matt, she did say, well, I'm very happy to wear a shorter skirt.

But then obviously she couldn't do that either.

So it was really rock and a hard place.

Right.

Although, while we're on men and women's skating, the patron saint of figure skating is a woman.

Saint Lydwina.

You heard of her?

No.

She was a Dutch teenager.

Because you know there are lots of canals and things in the Netherlands and they're often freeze over.

There's lots of skating happens on them.

And I think this was in the 13th century.

Anyway, she was skating.

She fell, she broke her leg, and she never recovered.

And as a result, she's the patron saint of figure skating.

Not completely sure why.

When was she around?

13th, a long time ago, several hundred years ago.

And it sounds quite stressful.

They think she might have had something that we recognize as a modern condition today, maybe the first ever case of MS, but also the saintly accounts are so strange and exaggerated, it's kind of hard to diagnose.

So, for example, large pieces of her body fell off, blood poured from her mouth, ears, and nose.

She shed bones, skin and part of her intestines, and her parents kept them in a vase.

Guess more, MS.

And they gave off an inky.

Her parents kept these bits of her body in a vase and they gave off a sweet odour so they knew she was holy.

Oh, the odour of sanctity.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's holy.

Anyways, wait, is she still alive while this is happening?

Yeah, yeah.

While her intestines are in the vase?

I think, from the account I read, yes.

Well, I was going to say, it doesn't sound like she's very good at skating if she broke her leg, but if, to be honest, if she's missing half of her body parts, it sounds like.

Well done to her for getting up in the morning.

Yeah, yeah.

She never skated again, anyway.

Wow.

Sad times.

That's very funny.

You still get costume infringements, don't you, in skating?

I hadn't realised this.

In fact, I knew very little about figure skating, but you can get points docked for wearing the wrong stuff now.

Well, you used to be able to until, I think, about less than 20 years ago, it used to be that women couldn't wear skirts that came up above like the bum or the hip so you had to wear a skirt

yeah so sorry you had to wear that's too sexy that's so sexy it's above the bum that's just having your bum out isn't it hang on i'm not i don't want to i don't want to sound like you're prude but i do think there are some good reasons i think every now and then the phrase you're not going out looking like that young lady

is appropriate

I've misspoken.

They had to wear skirts and they had to be below the bum.

I should have said it like that.

Okay.

Yeah, so you would be fined.

So you'd have to cover the bum.

You have to cover the bum.

You'd have a point dock.

Well, you don't anymore.

You can wear a leotard, can't you?

Yes.

Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But your bum is not fully out.

There's no mooning at the Olympics.

I don't know what the rules are on that, but I think you have to cover genitals.

And he's thinking he might get jumped as one of those detectives.

What a finishing move that would be for your routine.

Lots of jumps, lots of spins, and a full moon at the end of it.

Suck it, guys.

So, on infringements, there was someone at the 2018 Winter Olympics called Gabriella Papadakis whose nipple fell out during her performance.

A Janet Jackson moment.

A Jackson moment.

She got points.

It was just, it didn't fall off.

They had an argument.

They fell out.

It smelled sweet, though.

It had the odour of sanctity.

The detectives rushed onto the ice to collect it.

And put it in a jar.

It came out of her costume.

And it looks, it's like your worst nightmare.

But also, you're getting points docked.

Not only have you exposed yourself in national television, you also get points deducted.

They still got silver, impressively.

Have you heard of the job of the Olympic figure skating poo wrangler?

Oh, Jesus Christ, no.

No.

Surely the detective can double up.

Is that take a scoop on?

What on earth could this be?

Oh, I know.

Is it about Hanyu, the Japanese guy?

Yes, it is.

I do know.

So this is a skater.

He's called, yeah, he's Japanese.

He's called Yuzuru Hanyu, and he's associated with Winnie the Pooh.

He loves Winnie the Pooh, and his fans, as a result, love Winnie the Pooh too.

And whenever he skates, they throw Winnie the Pooh stuffed toys onto the ice.

It sounds like it would ruin your routine.

They throw hundreds.

It's insane.

And there was a job the last, I mean, I don't know if it's at every single Olympics, but basically, there has to be someone who skates around scooping up the Winnie the Poos.

Right.

I watched it.

I watched Hanyu in this Olympics, and there was no Winnie the Poos there.

So maybe because of COVID?

So, well, Xi Jinping is

Xi Jinping hates being compared to Winnie the Pooh.

I forgot about that.

For some reason, for such a powerful guy, he's pretty thin-skinned about this.

He doesn't like being compared to Winnie the Pooh.

And

yeah, and so it would have been a big problem.

Fortunately, foreign spectators have not been allowed into China for this Olympics, so no Winnie the Poos have been chucked out.

Han Yu's fans are super crazy.

Like, they literally, they're called Fanyus, and they go around the world just following.

Like, if they can get tickets anywhere, they'll go on eBay for thousands of pounds.

Like, he's really, really super famous.

But what's weird is, I've been to a few sporting events recently, and in most cases, these days, you get checked as you're coming in to these sort of bigger ones.

You have to, you know, if you go even see gigs at like the O2, there's a metal detector and so on.

Right.

Surely that's the spot to put the Pooh Wrangler.

You know, to.

But I think normally when it's not happening in a state where the totalitarian head of state is compared to Winnie the Pooh and hates it.

I'm not talking about current Beijing.

I'm talking about the other.

I think they're fine with that.

I like the other one.

Yeah, it's fun, yeah.

Surely not at

not Olympic level.

If you're going for gold, he'd be really annoyed.

Surely they'd hold back.

It's not at him on the ice.

It's onto the ice while he's performing.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not mid-routine.

Yeah.

Okay.

But it is apparently off-putting for his opponent.

So Nathan Chen, who's the other, like, really amazing finger skater male, his manager hates it.

His manager thinks it's like psychological warfare against him.

He's jealous because he wants a teddy.

That is so sad.

That's what Djokovic behaves.

He's been trying to push his own thing, like, you know, trolls are my little ponies.

Come on.

One sad troll thrown by his manager at the end.

So, the whole thing about the couples doing their dances, I was reading this article where it sort of says, obviously, the choreography is amazing, but also what they want is emotion and they want to feel a routine.

And so, a love story tends to be the thing that you kind of go for.

And so, a problem that siblings have is that they obviously it's a bit off if you see a brother and sister kind of doing sort of sex.

So, they have a really odd position where they have to come up with slightly kookier routines as a result because they can't, yeah,

they can't be seen to be like almost kissing at the end of a routine.

There was one in this Olympics, I'm not sure if it was brother and sister, it probably wasn't, but one of them was an alien and the other one was someone being

probed.

It would still be too sexy for brother and sister, I'm thinking.

You get the Benny Hill music playing, one of them chasing the other one with a probe.

That's 10 points from me.

Isn't it interesting?

They've never tried the Benny Hill music, to my knowledge.

It's too sexual.

That's the problem.

One of the most famous figure skaters of all time, Tonya Harding, at least one of the most infamous.

I was reading up on her.

I never saw that movie with Margot Robbie.

But

Tonya, yeah.

But what a pretty extraordinary life that she's led, even post-her career.

So she got banned as a result of a controversy where she was implicated in harming another skater, what was her name?

Nancy Kerrigan.

Yeah,

wasn't it?

It was her ex-husband hired someone to do it.

And what came out through court cases was that maybe she had an inkling that this was going to happen, that they were planning something.

That's got her a lifetime ban, basically.

But post this happening, she released a sex tape.

It was a sort of leaked sex tape, but then she went to penthouse, I think it was, and Playboy and said you can officially release it for an amount of money.

She became a manager for Pro Wrestlers.

She became herself a boxer.

She did boxing.

She started a band called the Golden Blades.

They got booed off stage on their first gig.

Oh my God.

Yeah, she's worked as a welder, a painter, and a metal.

Yeah,

this is her career.

A painter at a metal fabrication company, a hardware sales clerk, a deck builder.

She set the automobile racing land speed record.

Tanya's had a fucking life.

She's desperately trying to erase the one thing everyone knows about her.

Just trying anything on her Wikipedia is all these different things, but they still put that at the start.

Exactly.

But she was an amazing figure skater.

And when they made this movie with Margot Robbie, there's a scene in it where Margot Robbie has to do a triple axle.

And Margot Robbie, who did train to do it, obviously couldn't do it, but they also couldn't find anyone to do it because it's so rare that anyone's ever landed that, that they had to use CGI in the film.

Yeah.

She's also amazing at bow and arrow shooting.

There was a piece about her that interviewed her, and she goes hunting a lot with her husband, like hunting sort of elk

skaters,

hunting elk and such like.

And her husband takes a big gun and she just takes a bow and arrow.

She says because she wants to give the animal a 50-50 chance to make it interesting and fair.

Although the journalist points out also because felons aren't technically supposed to possess calming rights.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that in the early 1900s, the US government installed telephones at the top of trees.

Hmm.

What?

Pretty cool.

Just a convenient place to make a call.

This.

A trunk call?

Good.

Yeah.

Is that a thing?

That's a very old-fashioned term for a very long-distance phone call, yeah.

Oh, okay.

Would have got a huge laugh in the 70s.

This is, it was the U.S.

Forest Service that started installing them at like turn of the century, early 1900s, and it was for fire lookouts.

So it was in like fire-prone states, like your Arizonas or your Californias, and they'd find the tallest tree on top of the biggest hill in the area, and then they'd climb to the top, or they put a ladder up the tree, and then a ranger would basically lop off the top of the tree and in its place put a platform there.

And on the platform is just a telephone.

And then a guy's job is to sit at the top of the tree.

And then if he sees a fire, he makes a phone call and says, fire.

Yeah.

And they go and put it out.

It's so cool.

And

what I didn't get was it says sometimes they worked in pairs.

And so there'd be two of them up the tree.

And one of them spots the fire and then sends the other one to put it out.

But I don't understand how one single human being

giant forest fires.

Yeah, this is a small campfire, I suppose.

What would you be?

You would just, if it was small enough, you'd only see a plume of smoke, right?

I think as soon as you see flames, that one guy's not really gonna

appreciate being sent on his own.

Once the flames are coming out, the top of the forest.

Yeah, were you allowed to use the telephones for other things, like calling your mates or stuff?

No personal phone calls.

Oh, really?

So they do go through at the end of the month your phone record.

The bill's very high this month.

We don't remember hearing from you at all.

Lots of fires.

They're still there today, some of them.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

They get called the freaks of the peaks.

That's one cool nickname they have.

The trees.

The people are the trees.

The people, the people, I think.

But there are not many left.

There were 5,000 at most in the 30s, and now there, I think, are a few hundred, maybe 500.

I think it went up.

I think its peak was the 50s where they were about 10,000 in the US.

But yeah, I think such a cool job, such an interesting kind of person who does that job.

You've got to be very happy with your own company.

Yeah.

Well, no, if there's two of you up there.

That's a good point.

But in most cases, it's like the lookout,

not the tree situation, but other lookout sounds like it was one person the entire time.

Yeah,

mostly it does seem to be one person.

Jack Kerouac was one of these guys, wasn't he?

Was he?

Yeah, he was.

He spent 63 days as a U.S.

Forest Service fire lookout on a place called Desolation Peak.

Sounds fun.

Yeah, and he went there thinking that he'll be on his own.

He only has to look out for fires for a while, so it'll be fine.

He can write some stuff.

But in the end, he wrote only one letter to his mother, some haiku poetry, and a couple of journal entries, and no novels.

Well, this I was reading one of the lookouts today who says when new people come to do the job, apply for the job, they imagine they're going to do all this stuff, like write their great novel and learn an instrument, he says, or you know, they think.

You can't imagine if you had like two of you at the top of the thing.

You see, laughing,

climbing with the bagpipes.

You laugh.

There's genuinely a girl who's learning bagpipes while she does this.

Really?

I believe

solitary ones, yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

But yeah, he says people tend to get nothing done.

You actually go and you end up with.

I'm sure.

I mean, you always think you're going to get stuff done, and you never do.

That's just life.

I mean, your job is literally doing nothing.

But it's to look.

You have to be looking for fires, don't you?

You have to be scanning the horizon.

I feel like you can look and play the bagpipes at the same time.

Yes, that is one of the things.

It's kind of sad that there are all these people by themselves at the top of trees.

It's a 50-50 split, and yet they obviously can't date each other because they're all at the top of trees.

No, they should.

You know how trees have sex.

They kind of fire the

seed into the wind.

Into the wind.

They should try that.

I'm sure it's been tried.

I'm sure someone's done it.

It gets pretty dull up there.

We've had some complaints from tourists at the bottom of the tree.

Well, they could do they did a sort of semaphore way, not a semaphore, they did a way of communicating in the very early days before the phones.

What?

No, not semenophore.

There we go, thank you.

Didn't need to happen, did it?

They had these things called heliographs.

So the ones that weren't high-tech enough to have the telephones in the early 1900s would just have two mirrors and there would be someone and they'd be called the flasher who would

use the mirrors to transmit messages by bouncing the sun off them.

Right.

Isn't that how you start fires?

That's a great point.

That was a major flaw in the plan.

Yeah, I guess you have to be quite careful.

I guess if you make sure it's a convex mirror,

maybe.

Interesting.

But yeah, it would reflect the sunlight and they could transmit Morse code up to 70 miles.

So we're saying that this is a technology basically.

It's not a technology, it's a lack of technology that should be wiped out by now, but it's still going.

And you would think with drones, with satellite imagery, with planes, we wouldn't need this anymore.

But it's survived because it's the one thing that we can still do when there is an electrical storm and we can't send up drones and we can't get satellite imaging through clouding and so on.

So it's a job that hasn't died out through the modern technological world, which is pretty cool.

They've done a few studies recently and found that the human observation is as efficient, if not more efficient overall than using drones and stuff like that.

Exactly like Dan says, they can't be used in all conditions and stuff.

And also, they know, because it's such a personal attachment they have to the land.

So often they've been there 30 or 40 years, you'll get out.

So they've lived up there, so they know every centimeter of the land.

So these people can instinctively spot the tiniest thing wrong.

But do you think they're like, there's a fire where?

You know where the co-op used to be?

Where old Vera used to live?

Yeah, just down there.

Yeah, it's that.

A lot of co-ops in the forest, actually.

They use something called an Osborne Firefinder, don't they?

An OFF,

which is a topographic map.

So, you know, like those maps when you go to a tourist place and it shows you where all the things are on the horizon.

It's like this building is this tower, this building.

It's like one of those.

And then there's a few different things so you can tell exactly where the fire is happening.

And that was invented in 1840 by a guy called Sir Francis Ronalds.

And he also was one of the first people to do electrical signaling.

So when he was 28, he put eight miles worth of iron wire on his mother's lawn in Hammersmith and managed to send a signal from one end of the eight miles to the other end of the eight miles.

It was all kind of like folded up, so he didn't go very far in actual terms.

But he said after that, he said, Why add to the torments of pens, ink, paper, and posts?

Let us all have electrical conversazione offices communicating with each other all over the kingdom.

Give me enough material, and I will electrify the world.

Wow.

So he basically invented email.

Yeah.

Amazing.

I just sort of imagined him at the end of his garden going like, Mum, talk into the wire.

And his mum being like, I can just say to you, come in for dinner, talk into the wire, mum.

I can hear it.

Yeah, you can, you're 10 meters away from me.

That's so funny.

On the watchman thing, but the non-fire-related watchman now, so

Lausanne in Switzerland has its own watchman who climbs the bell tower every night and shouts the time.

And that's been going since 1405.

They can't afford a clock up there or anything.

I think they've also...

Switzerland.

You're absolutely right.

In fact, they've definitely got a clock because it's the bell goes and then the watchkeeper shouts the time and shouts that it's all fine.

The watch watcher.

Yeah.

So that's all fine.

Yeah,

there's a rubric that you say, which is, you know, it's 10 o'clock and all is well.

Good night.

Oh, not like 10 bongs and yep, it's right again.

I do think they, I think they speak after the bell rings.

In fact, they do.

The bell rings and then they shout from the four sides of the towel what time it is.

Anyway, for the first time.

It feels like a redundant job this way.

I mean, that's

the owner of the bell just trying to find a gig for his kid.

They've just appointed their first ever female watchkeeper in 2021.

This is after 600 years.

They've got...

Yeah, it is.

And there was a big protest a couple of years ago about the fact that that no women have been invited to

be

no, no, no, right.

A couple of years ago, a lot of women said, look, we want into this a sweet gig, apparently.

Do we?

Well, they had a vacancy last year to join the team, and I think 80% of the applications were from women's.

I think what you want is a dinner lady.

They have the loudest voices in the world, don't they?

Yes.

And there was a voice test.

That was part of it.

It was a sort of they need to test, you know, that you've got a good pair of lungs to shout the time.

And the job comes with a little lodge that you can keep warm in, in between bongs, I guess.

And it comes with a felt hat, a lantern, and a cheese fondue set.

It's in the lodge.

Pretty Swiss.

With those perks, I can really understand why they went for it.

A felt hat.

Just one more thing, actually, on fire towers that I found so interesting is that this was, I was reading a piece with a lookout called Levi Brinneger.

And I do want to say they all have really cool names like that, or like Leif Horgan, all names that sound like they're a forest lookout.

But Levi Brineger pointed out that if there's a lightning storm,

you are in the tallest place up the tallest tree with an electric phone line that you're supposed to use.

So, first of all, they do have a kill switch.

They have a kill switch to kill the phone lines if the lightning came too close.

And then, if it's really close, they have a stool.

And there are a couple of others who all had this: a stool where they just put sort of glasses on each leg, under the leg, to insulate it from lightning.

So you just go and sit on this one stool in the middle of the room and wait for the lightning to pass when it was struck by lightning.

I would have thought the power of a lightning bolt on a tree, if it hits it.

It explodes it.

It explodes, exactly.

And it doesn't matter if you've got four tiny glasses in the bottom of your chair.

I think friend of the podcast, Roy Sullivan, was that his name?

The guy who was struck by lightning seven times.

I think one of the times he was hit by lightning was when he was up a fire lookout thing.

Was it?

Yeah, yeah, no, don't put it on.

Didn't put his glasses under the stool.

clearly.

And in fact it wasn't one of the other times when he was being chased by a bear.

Do you remember?

He was chased by a bear, then struck by lightning.

Yeah, he was beating it off with a stick.

Sorry, he wasn't.

Let me rephrase that.

He was beating the bear with a stick.

Well then I don't blame the bear for chasing him.

Yeah.

He just wanted to do an ice dance.

Okay, it is time for fact number three.

That is Andy.

My fact is, there is a worm which can grow multiple bottoms, which it then fires off to have sex without it.

Okay.

Yeah.

So this is a newly named worm.

Very exciting.

There were a couple in the same kind of family with the same kind of body shape that were known about already, but this is a new one.

It's called Ramicillus Kingidorahi, which is after a thing from Godzilla.

One of the other

villain things.

I mean, yeah.

I always thought Godzilla was the villain, but anyway, we'll call that.

I'm sure we'll come to that.

Basically, this worm is an amazing branching creature.

It lives in sea sponges.

It has one head, and then the back end of it branches, because

it lives in a sea sponge.

It branches through all the different tunnels and crevices and paths of the sponge, right?

And then, when it wants to reproduce, basically the end of each branch of its body, and there can be dozens or even hundreds of these branches, the end of each one breaks off.

swims up to the surface independently releases its eggs or sperm into the water column where they'll all find each other

So they fertilize each other and then the bums die.

But the head of the worm living in the sea sponge lives, lives to breed another day and it starts regenerating all of its

bums.

It's incredible.

It really is.

It's just such a weird, weird thing.

I just feel so sorry for the head.

Don't you think that is the worst?

Because you're spending your whole life as a face buried in the pitch-black belly of a sponge and you're sending off your asses to have sex and you never ever get to do that yourself.

Isn't that so weird?

Yes.

You do have a nice sponge to live in.

Yeah.

I guess that's why I can't do that.

I've got that sponge bath every day.

They can't survive.

The head part can't survive outside the sponge.

As soon as they go outside the sponge, they die.

Oh, it's like the lady in Shalot.

I bet they sometimes want to.

I bet there are a few heads who have gone, sod it.

I'm going to give it a go.

Yeah.

They pop out.

It's so crazy, isn't it, when you think of

evolution, right?

Like, just the fact that this thing had to evolve to send its anus off to go and have the babies, you know, while like it was like, what do we do?

My head can't leave this sponge.

What do I do?

These things that you call bums as well, they are kind of, they can be more than bums.

They can have, like, they have very rudimentary brains, they have very rudimentary eyes.

Yeah.

So they're like, not just a bum.

No, you're absolutely right.

So they're their own kind of, as it were, consciousness, even though I know they're not thinking, but they've got their own

nerves, and

they're called stolons, technically.

So they're reproductive units.

But as James says, they've got eyes, they've got very primitive brains, and that helps them to steer and to mate.

I find this the most extraordinary thing about this, and almost anything I've ever read in nature, that these are basically living creatures that they turn into.

So every single time they let go of a branch,

they split their organs in half somehow.

So every organ duplicates.

So that branch has its own set of organs that it then goes off with destroys by itself.

It's so weird.

So like all of them have guts and nerves and every single branch does and so when it when a when it forks you know the organs fork as well yeah and there some of them have been measured so this is the other the other species ramacellus multicordata which is just a very similar creature they've been measured with 500 different branches the reason you kind of call them bums is because when they're sticking out of the sponge it's the bum bitch which sticking out right yeah and the way that they eat is they kind well we're not quite sure because no one's ever found any food inside any of them it's it's insane it's insane but what we think is that they dissolve they kind of soak in the food into their body and then you know there's no stomach or anything like that and then they send out the waste through the bums yeah and then when they become like the thing that reproduces and decides to swim off then a new little anal opening comes where they used to live and then they grow out again constantly mooning the world

um they were found the first one was found in the 1870s and then they didn't find the other two species because there are three species altogether, this thing, until about 20 years ago.

And the first one was found on the Challenger expedition, which I had never read about, but is this extraordinary expedition from 18, maybe, maybe we've discussed it before, but 1872 to 1876, this three and a half year voyage, which basically started oceanography.

And I didn't realise that before that, people didn't care about the oceans at all.

It was a big team of people, and it sounds really dull.

So Darwin had called the oceans a tedious waste, a desert of water.

He was like, there's nothing in here, Don't bother with it.

So everyone thought that, and then they set off on this expedition.

You think that's because you know how Darwin basically lived in England, right?

And then he went all the way over to the Galapagos, all the way over the sea.

Do you reckon people said, what were you doing on the way?

Or were you doing fuck all?

He was like, oh, it's pointless.

I wouldn't do anything anyway.

It's just the sea.

There's nothing in there.

He forgot to look in it.

Or was it the opposite where he found he obviously knew how much was in there, but he was just trying to put off other scientists.

No, don't bother looking there.

That was his watermate.

Yeah, he always went to get to it.

Well, they did look there, and they collected 4,800 new species.

And they found the Mariana's trench on that expedition, and they started the whole field.

This guy who we're talking about with all the bums and the way that he eats by dissolving stuff that is around him basically is how mushrooms live.

And so I read one place that they said that it's basically an animal that has adopted a fungal lifestyle.

So

it's living like a fungus lives, but it's an animal.

Yeah, it does seem like that.

And actually, other marine worms do that kind of dissolving thing, don't they?

There's a worm called the zombie worm, which feeds off skeletons of mostly whales, but other dead ocean animals at the bottom of the sea.

And that sends acid out onto the bone, which kind of melts it.

Well,

dissolves it.

And then they just live inside whale bones forever and ever.

That's incredible.

That is really amazing.

I think I read that there are some sponges which have been observed feeding on fossils and the fossilized bones of ancient whales and it's why the fossil record is really patchy in some places is just because down the eaters

yeah I guess yeah I suppose if bones didn't disintegrate we would just have just been knead-eating well if you yeah if you actually like if you looked at the bottom of the ocean it should just be bones right

at least one layer is it really well they get well they get um compressed and compressed over time and they form rock layers basically i mean so if you look at chalk cliffs that's all um the skeletons of plankton stuff.

That's right.

So I suppose bones just turn into what everything else turns into which is mulch.

That's true but I'm talking I think I'm just talking short term.

Let's say in like a 50 year period there must be a lot of sea creatures that die that just do a collection of bones but they're being eaten by because these zombie worms and things like that.

Exactly.

Scale worms are another water worm.

Oh yeah.

And some of them have this really cool trick.

So they're a bit like wood lice with the wood lice of the sea.

So they have these like hard scales around them, and that's so that if something tries to eat them, they slough off these scales, and the scales end up in the thing's mouth, and they wriggle off.

But then, sometimes they have scales that produce like bioluminescent light, and so something will try to eat it.

They slough off the scales in the thing's mouth, and then the thing's mouth is glowing in the dark, and then that thing gets hunted by its predator

literally in its case.

Yeah,

that's clever.

Have you heard of the bobbit worm?

Oh, yeah, that's the massive one?

It's huge, yeah.

It's like 10 feet long.

It's an iridescent worm.

It buries its body into the ocean and it sort of just sits there and it sends out these kind of traps, like five little antennae that just sit there.

And if a fish comes along, it leaps out, just sort of slithers very quickly, and with its jaws, it can snap.

The force is so great, it can slice a fish in half.

Like it's just like insanely rippling.

But it then brings it back down into a hole, and they don't fully know what happens next.

Scientists have not any any idea really of what happens next because we haven't been able to study it.

So they don't know if there's a toxin that goes into the animal that, if they haven't split into two, that is still alive, that just then kills it, and then they can, you know, ingest it and so on.

Well, so sometimes it's still alive, kind of thing, depending on how they kill it.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, sometimes they'll bring something back in that they've just got a good grip on, as opposed to having a slice.

And the thought is, is that the name, although no one's fully sure, they think John Wayne Bobbitt's wife is the inspiration for

I think that is known, isn't it?

I think that wasn't conclusive.

I think it was a sort of nickname given to it, and they sort of, well, at least the places I was reading saying we're not fully sure.

Because it doesn't do anything to your genitals.

It's not like it bites your balls off or you slip.

No.

It doesn't slice anything.

So we should say this is a famous case of a couple called John Wayne Bobbitt and his wife, Lorena Bobbitt, and she cut off his penis.

Yes.

And threw it out of a car.

Yeah.

Yes.

And this isn't what the worm does, but it does seem like too much.

There's something a bit slicey and a bit penisy involved here, because it's this worm.

Yes.

It kind of lives under the sand and then jumps out and grabs you, a bit like the worms in Dune, really, I think.

Or

what's that other one?

Tremors, a bit like Tremors.

Yes.

It has been compared to the Mongolian death worm.

Yes.

And here we are, back onto the 18th century.

It hasn't featured in SpongeBob SquarePants yet, has it, this creature.

No.

Imagine if.

Is there an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants where it has one of these bum dividing worms in it.

SpongeBob gets worms.

Yeah.

So a little bit on Godzilla, maybe?

Yes.

He is a Japanese citizen.

Date of birth, April 9th, 1954.

Reason for special residency.

He's got a special residency.

You'd have to.

Yeah, yeah.

For promoting the entertainment of and watching over the Kabukicho neighborhood and drawing drawing visitors from around the world.

Because I know you've been to Japan, Andy.

Have you seen the giant Godzilla that's sticking out of one of the buildings?

It's really cool next to Shinjuko station.

Yeah.

Just walking down the street and you turn around and suddenly there's a massive Godzilla sort of looking over you.

That's so cool.

Is he watching over?

Because I thought that he destroyed buildings.

Well,

he doesn't move because he's just a statue.

No, but the idea of Godzilla is the idea of a very destructive creature, right?

I see what you mean, actually.

I mean,

he could save you from Mothra or from whoever this other guy was, King Ghidorah.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a complicated relationship because, basically, you know, at various points, he's been the goodie and the heel.

And, you know,

if he's fighting King Kong, for example,

as he did in the latest very bad movie.

Hang on, they're two completely different.

Well,

you haven't seen King Kong versus Godzilla, have you?

And I've got to say, that's two hours.

I'm never getting back.

It wasn't about it.

It wasn't bad, really.

It wasn't bad.

I mean, Kong Skull Island is magnificent.

Is it?

Yeah.

Yeah, you keep telling me that.

But basically, Godzilla can be a goodie and baddie.

I mean, very, very destructive of property.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Back to that.

Okay.

Yeah.

He can be angered.

But he's never on the side of the humans, right?

Or is he?

He's not really on any side.

He's on Kong.

He's on Zealous Side.

I fancy him.

So there's a love story with him.

No, that's Kong, isn't it?

Faye Dunaway in the 33 movie yeah there's always yeah that's the that's the yeah that's kong that's kong that's kong yeah or brie larson in kong skull island yeah sure okay and actually they don't really have a relationship in the same way that kong and fay dunaway did i would say

when you're on mastermind and they say what's your specialist subject if you do choose kong and godzilla don't just give a fucking monologue as soon as he asks his first question because you're gonna run out of time the thing about skull island is though it's a brilliant vietnam War red foot.

The whole move is incredible.

I started and finished a long time ago, Andrew.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested so often during his sets that he would go on stage wearing his coat just so he was ready to leave with the police immediately.

Brilliant.

Go on.

Yeah, so this is a fact that I learned in a brilliant autobiography that was written by George Carlin, who is also one of the greatest stand-ups that we've ever had.

It's called Last Words.

Highly recommend anyone who's interested in the world of comedy reading it.

And this was on a night in 1962 when he was, Lenny Bruce was playing at a club called The Gate of Horn.

And during the performance, a police officer stood up in the middle of the crowd and he basically shut down the show.

show and he immediately arrested Bruce and he tried to take him to jail.

So Carlin's bit of this story is that he was upstairs having a drink with another comic.

And they weren't only just arresting Lenny Bruce, they were also arresting anyone else that they could because they wanted to make a real point about this happening, this gig.

So they ID'd everyone who was at the show to see if there were any minors there to see if they could arrest them, if anyone was too young to be there.

They arrested the owner and the bartender because...

drinks were being served during the set, which was not allowed.

And they ended up arresting as well, George Carlin, who was upstairs and refused to give his ID and started making a joke out of it because he was quite drunk.

So George Carlin ended up in the van, the police van with Lenny Bruce.

And so he was there specifically for this moment.

Lenny told him he would wear his coat while he was on stage because sometimes the police would just take him out immediately and he wouldn't be able to get his coat.

And he loved his coat because it was made from a really nice cashmere and he didn't want to be parted with it.

So that's why he wore it on stage all the time.

I saw that he went to prison.

They bailed him out, right?

And he was back on stage by something like 1 a.m.

for the second show of the night.

When he was on stage, he did a joke by saying, I better keep my coat on because I may have to go out again.

So he kind of made a point of the arrest as well.

Yeah.

Do we know how long into the set the policeman waited?

Did he wait for him to do all his favourite jokes and then stand up?

Or did he just give him 10 seconds?

Wait until he said something really rude.

It was, yeah, it was the moment he said something rude.

So Lenny Bruce is, if you haven't heard of him as the listener of this show, he was a 1960s comedian.

The listener.

We have more than one listener.

Sorry, I have one listener.

The rest of you have millions.

I've got one dedicated listener.

He was basically, in a way, the first modern stand-up comedian.

And there were a lot of comedians before him, obviously.

And you can say people like Bob Hope and so on, who would go around on stage telling jokes, but they were very much joke merchants.

They had a team of writers who were writing for them.

Lenny Bruce was the first person to really talk about his personal life.

He used swear words.

He talked like a real person, basically.

It was like stream of consciousnessy type stuff rather than just gag gag gag well yeah and they were but they were written it was written material as well but he was basically counterculture america he was part of the beat people so jack kerouac who was mentioned before very much part of that scene and he opened up the whole industry of stand-up to this new way of doing it what came with that is he spoke about very controversial topics he spoke about religion which he really didn't like he used swear words on stage which no one was doing at this time and so he was constantly being arrested for these reasons and um he became a sort of martyr to the whole of the comedy industry because he's well, no, we should say that he was pardoned as well, which is great news.

So he was convicted of obscenity, but then he was pardoned.

In this one, right?

Well, so this is when he was tried in 1964 for obscenity and prosecuted.

But the good news is that he was pardoned.

And it was in 2003 that he was pardoned.

That's right.

He had been dead for nearly 40 years.

But

there was a petition to cancel it.

So the governor of New York was George Pataki, who in 2003 granted this posthumous pardon.

The petition was brought by a couple of comedians I'd never heard of called Tom Smothers and Dick Smothers, known as the Smothers brothers, who themselves were cancelled and, you know, and properly cancelled because they were very lefty.

And that was obviously also pretty controversial.

So he wasn't found guilty in the event that Dan was describing.

He was got off there.

His defense compared him to Aristophanes Rabelais and Jonathan Swift

in the court case.

And the jury agreed, and they let him off.

And then he was later arrested quite a lot of times in lots of different places, but in New York was the big famous one, which is what you're talking about.

I think I agree with the judge, right?

I don't know Rabelais, come on, I'm not that pretentious.

But Aristophanes and Swift, kind of impenetrable, desperate, want to be satirists, apparently genius, but actually not that fun to experience.

I would say it's quite a good description of Lenny Bruce.

Wow.

For me.

Yeah, yeah, that's fine.

Look.

For me.

Julian Swift is very funny.

And some of the Aristophanes stuff is great.

I love the level, Anna.

How can you be at a level where you're pretentious enough to know Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift?

But no, I'm not pretentious enough to know Rabelais.

God, we all know that's the line, okay?

You've crossed the line when you know Rabelais.

I mean, he represented himself in court at various points, so that might have been the point where he was being compared to Jonathan Swift and Aristophanes.

He fired his lawyer halfway through this trial, the 1964 one.

And then the New York Law Journal refused to publish the judgment because it contained offensive words.

So, right.

And then, just going back to the original one that you were talking about, Dan, he I was reading the newspaper articles from the day and from the day after and stuff.

And he did his second show and then he went back to his hotel, the Clift Hotel, and then he got kicked out of his hotel because the hotel owner had heard about him being arrested and didn't want his like in his hotel.

And so he just got kicked out into the street.

And as a result, from then on, he performed always with a small suitcase on stage.

He

did like a spot of morphine, heroin.

Yes, and actually, he was ejected from another hotel once for blocking its toilet with heroin needles

or for blocking its toilet with needles, isn't it?

It's not like toilet roll, it's like

maybe it only takes a couple of needles to block a loo.

I've never, never tried it, but there was another time he was,

I promise.

We've been on tour with you, we know you are a needle toilet blocker.

The number of Premier ins we've been unceremoniously kicked out of

i'm sorry about that but i have changed um he was he was another thing i do on tour actually he was kicked out of another hotel for apparently conducting a nocturnal trio of blondes in an original composition the chorus of which ran please me lenny in three-part harmony Wow, in harmony.

In harmony.

Actually, at a premiere in, you wouldn't be allowed to do that because they have their good night's sleep policy.

all those signs saying shh

that's why it's lenny henry who's the mascot and not lenny bruce it was a teacup wasn't it

thank you um but yeah he had he had a big old sexual appetite and he uh married a stripper called honey harlow yes yeah but as you say anna like you don't think he's funny and a lot of people absolutely agree with you he has to be looked at as someone who is just the person who paved the way and who you know richard pryer who is seen by many as the funniest person ever says that lenny bruce was the funniest person ever George Carlin, as well, Lenny Bruce was the funniest person ever.

Modern-day comedians like Mark Maron, Lenny Bruce, funniest person ever.

Michael McIntyre.

Michael McIntyre, you can see the influence so much in McIntyre's material.

But they did, they did a on the film.

I like, did I just say I like Michael McIntyre?

I don't even know why I said that.

It's just the first name that came into my head.

They're just not similar.

However much you like either of them, I don't think Michael McIntyre would claim that he's taking after Lenny Bruce.

I'm just saying if Michael McIntyre wants to be on his BBC primetime show, I'm sorry.

he does block a lot of hotel tourists with heroin needles.

That's the market thing, isn't it?

It's kind of his trademark, yeah.

But on the 50th anniversary of his death, they did a screening of one of his recorded stand-up shows to an audience of fans and just to you know commemorate him.

It was 40 minutes of jokes and hardly anyone laughed according to the article.

And that makes sense.

He was a conscience.

He's someone that you go, when you're watching him, you go, ah, You sort of smile.

I like Stuart Lee.

That's certainly a bit of Stuart Lee's joke.

Is there anyone left?

Let's just destroy anyone we might work with in future.

There was a brilliant article in Playboy that

was quoting him in 1963.

And he was talking about when

he was going on stage and the owner decided to introduce him, but was really worried that he was going to get a bad reaction.

And so the owner said, ladies and gentlemen, the star of our show, Lenny Bruce, who incidentally is an ex-GI and a hell of a good performer, folks.

And he's a great kidder, you know what I mean?

It's just a bunch of silliness.

He doesn't mean what he says.

The kids and the Pope and the Jewish religion, honestly, it's just a make-believe world.

It's fine.

He's a hell of a nice guy, folks.

And he was at a veterans hospital today doing a show for the boys.

And here he is.

And by the way, his mum's out there tonight, too.

She hasn't seen him in a couple of years and she lives here in the town.

Now, a joke's a joke, right, folks?

What the hell?

I wish she'd try and cooperate.

And whoever has been sticking ice picks in the tires outside, that's not funny.

Is this real?

That's real?

That's the best intro ever.

That's good.

Did he?

I feel like he must have written

it, did he?

Yeah.

That's so good.

His mum, interestingly, was his main inspiration.

And she was really awesome.

She was this woman called Sally Maher.

And she was a stand-up comedian, well, before stand-up was a thing, really, in the 30s and 40s.

And she did impersonations.

I think was part of her comedy.

Like, she impersonated Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney and people like that.

And she...

introduced him on stage for his first ever show.

Oh, did she?

Well, his first big break, he was in a radio show called Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts.

And she was the hype woman for him.

She was a manager also later in her career.

Yes.

So she managed who I did not know was a stand-up comedian, but the man who played Mr.

Miyagi from the Karate Kid movies, Pat Murito, was a stand-up before he became a sort of more serious actor.

And yeah, she managed him.

Really?

Yeah.

He had a brief act, didn't he?

Walks on, walks off beautiful that is beautiful lenny bruce actually he only ever performed once in the uk it was in london and it was on greek street in central london in soho and it was at the establishment club which was created by peter cook of beyond the fringe and it was The establishment was set up basically because they wanted to try and give acts the opportunity to try the stuff that was censored.

At this point in the UK, if you were performing, it was part of a theatre show and the Lord Chamberlain had veto over every script that would be performed.

So they'd go through and say, you can't say this and you can't say this.

But in private establishments, you were allowed to do that.

And so Peter Cook set up this place.

And that is how Lenny Bruce came to the UK for his one and only trip because he was deported the second time round.

He wasn't allowed in.

And by all accounts, it was quite a bad run of gigs.

He was pretty ill at that point in terms of the drug taking.

This story you mentioned about the women and the syringes, that was in London where that happened.

And Peter Cook himself, who was a massive fan of his, went and picked him up from the airport.

And he said that he just met this shambling guy coming out at the arrivals.

He got into the car and he was holding a record player, a sort of miniature tape recorder, and he insisted on playing his tapes all the way on the journey back.

And the tapes consisted of nothing but airplane noises and grunting and farting.

That was it.

And Peter Peter Cook just thought, what the hell is going on here?

And yeah, and so he came and he performed in London.

What was going on?

He doesn't really know.

Like Peter Cook just, basically, what he had was a junkie in the back of the car.

It's that classic junkie behavior playing fart noises over a tape layer, which hasn't been invented yet.

No, but he might have been, like, there's accounts of Lenny Bruce making car stops because he saw a field of flowers just so he could run and lay in them and then get back in the car.

And they didn't realise at the time he was doing heroin, and that was him just

of poppies

yeah

okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our Twitter accounts I'm on at Schreiberland Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at James Harkin and Anna you can email podcast.qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website no such thingasthafish.com.

Check out all of our previous episodes, which are up there.

Check out our merchandise as well, including the book that we put together for the tour, which is now selling online.

It's a sort of history of fish with lots of random fun things.

Check it out.

When you say fish, it's us.

It's not like a history of the

dictionary of underwater literature.

No, no, no, I've uploaded my new fish book.

Yeah, turns out there is such a thing.

So, yeah, no, do check that out.

And come back next week.

Listen to us again because we'll be back with another episode.

And we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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